Jessica Ernst, M.Sc. is a 55 year old Canadian environmental scientist with 30 years oil and gas industry experience. She is currently suing the Alberta government, Alberta energy regulator, the Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB), and EnCana for negligence and unlawful activities related to hydraulic fracturing. Click here to read more about the lawsuit.

Ernst’s statement of claim alleges that EnCana broke multiple provincial laws and regulations and contaminated a shallow aquifer that supplied drinking water to the Rosebud community with natural gas and toxic industry-related chemicals.

In March of this year, she gave a series of presentations (uploaded on youtube) about the potential impact of hydraulic fracturing, or “Fracking” across Ireland and the United Kingdom, which included talks in Lancashire (where test drilling began in Britain) and also Balcombe, Sussex. In these presentations she outlined her own case and explained more generally why she believes no healthy society should ever permit hydraulic fracturing.

In 2010, she was awarded the “Woman of Courage” award by UNANIMA International, a UN Economic and Social Council accredited NGO, for her efforts to hold companies accountable for environmental harm done by “fracking”.

I have embedded below a presentation she gave in America in 2012:

The industry claims that “with a history of 60 years, after nearly a million wells drilled, there are no documented cases that hydraulic fracturing has lead to the contamination of water”. A statement which involves not one lie, but two.

Unearthed: The Fracking Facade is a short documentary film that sets the record straight by explaining how the hydraulic fracturing process has changed (with current practices having little more than a decade-long history) and how the industry has covered up its poor record of polluting by means of intimidation, plausible deniability and the widespread use of non-disclosure agreements, which force victims to remain silent in return for guarantees of support either in the form of clean water deliveries, relocation, or financial compensation:

I only wish they could answer but for a hundredth part of their list of sins. Alas, it will never happen. And it’s not so much US leaders as ‘our’ corporations and the mentality that goes with it. Apparently, that particular phenomenon pretty much occurs the world over.

Will it ever change? Not in our lifetimes, I suspect. But maybe if the likes of you and me keep harping on all of the inequity, our fellow men and women may one day wake up to the contours of our social and political reality, and begin to resist and thereby reform it in earnest.

In the meantime, what can anyone do but point and shout, “Look at what “they” do! Look at what “they” do to “us!””